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Pasteurizing whole milk has reduced the risk of infection in people and, doubtless, saved millions of lives all over the world. The word “pasteurizing” comes from the name of the inventor, Louis Pasteur, who invented the method of heating milk to kill pathogens and improve human health.
On the dairy and calf ranch, pasteurizers are becoming more popular to improve quality of waste milk for calves. These units are generally large enough to pasteurize all the waste milk fed to calves – often hundreds or thousands of liters.
Researchers have been active in the area of calf early life nutrition and precision feeding older heifers. Higher nutritional levels early and controlled energy, especially post-breeding, have resulted in improved health and performance with lower cost and environmental waste.
Clean heifers are an integral part of mastitis prevention at Five Star Dairy (a DCHA sustaining member), Elk Mound, Wisconsin. The dairy keeps heifers clean and dry by using a bedded-pack housing system prior to calving. This arrangement helps prevent bacteria in the environment from colonizing heifer teat ends and entering the teat orifice.
This attention to cleanliness, rather than pre-treating heifers, is the preferred method for controlling mastitis in heifers at the dairy, and it has proven successful.
It can be debated whether heifers are the most low-maintenance group on the dairy. The truth is they can be low maintenance, if we give them the right start. Healthy heifers come from healthy calves and they become productive cows when we give them the tools they need at the right time.
Start your heifer health protocol as soon as they are born. Calving pens should be cleaned after each cow gives birth to reduce opportunity of disease transmission. After a cow has calved, don’t wait to milk the recently fresh cow with the animals in the hospital or fresh pens.
Editor’s note: The following article is the third in a series discussing electrolyte formulation and function in calves. Click here to read the first part, and click here to read the second in the series.
Earlier in this series, we saw that strong ions fully dissociate from other substances when they dissolve in water. This dissociation not only affects the electrolyte solution being fed to the calf, it also has profound effects within the animal itself.
As stewards of the environment, many dairy producers are concerned about their impact on the land, water and air. Much has been learned and understood about land and water, but producers still feel ill-equipped to deal with air emissions.
All it took was a whack of a broom, and a new concept was born.
Perhaps it was a moment of frustration or the thought of trying something different, but when Rejean Houle, president of U.S. Farm Systems, and his colleagues were trying to rid manure build-up from a separation screen, they found an easier way to get the job done.
They struck the screen with the end of a broom and watched as the vibrations sifted the solid material off the top of the screen.
Manure application is a big business. Commercial manure services and custom haulers or applicators are a very important component to agriculture, providing services that allow livestock producers to focus on livestock concerns and crop producers to focus on production practices.
It has been a journey, but you have finally completed the task of developing a nutrient management plan (NMP) or having someone else develop an NMP for your farm; now what?
Producers often think of themselves, with considerable justification, as stewards of the land and the environment. With that responsibility comes the task of balancing business goals with regulatory compliance. Ideally, the ultimate goal should be to maintain a perpetual state of proactive compliance.
Though it is almost always less costly over time to prevent an environmental problem than to fix it, producers can run afoul of regulations. Chemicals and nutrients, which producers work with regularly, can pollute.
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